Postethnic America [antikvár]

PREFACE Visiting New York City for the first time in 1967, I was astonished to see at the corner of Seventy-second Street and Broadway a group of Amish men. The long beards, wide-brimmed hats, and plain black coats identified them for me as some kind of Pennsylvania Dutch. They reminded me of photographs of my grandfather. In an instant 1 realized that they could not actually be Amish. Neither the hats nor the coats were quite right, and 1 could not imagine the stay-at-home Amish making even a brief visit to Manhattan. Clearly, they were members of some other group. So, 1 said to my fiancée, a native New Yorker, "Look at those Mennonites, or they may be Old Order Dunkers." She smiled patiently and said, "No, those are Hasidic Jews." Then she added, "My roots, not yours." If yet another lesson were needed in how little one